KFC jurors hear testimony from Rangers

BRYAN (AP) — Jurors on Monday heard testimony from two Texas Rangers — one retired and the other dead — in the capital murder trial of a second man charged in the notorious murders of five people abducted from an East Texas Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant a quarter-century ago.

Rusk County District Attorney Michael Jimerson, acting as former Texas Ranger Stuart Dowell, read Dowell's testimony from a 2005 trial. Dowell had testified he took a white box with blood on it to a Tyler Department of Public Safety lab shortly after the execution-style murders of five people abducted from the Kilgore restaurant on Sept. 23, 1983.

Dowell died in 2005 after a lengthy illness.

Darnell Hartsfield is charged in the murders of David Maxwell, 20; Mary Tyler, 37; Opie Ann Hughes, 39; Joey Johnson, 20; and Monte Landers, 19. All but Landers worked at the restaurant about 25 miles east of Tyler and 115 miles east of Dallas. Landers was a friend of Maxwell and Johnson and was visiting them as the restaurant was closing for the night.

The trial of Hartsfield, 47, of Tyler, comes almost a year after his cousin, Romeo Pinkerton, took a plea bargain midway through his own trial.

If convicted, Hartsfield faces an automatic life prison term because prosecutors have said they won't seek the death penalty. The convicted burglar and drug dealer already was serving life for perjury when DNA testing tied him to the KFC killings.

State District Judge Clay Gossett allowed Dowell's threeyear old testimony because it was part of a trial record, the Tyler Morning Telegraph reported Monday in its online edition. The testimony came over the objections of defense attorneys Don Killingsworth and Thad Davidson.

Jimerson took the stand to read Dowell's testimony as Texas Attorney General prose- cutor Lisa Tanner asked the same questions she asked Dowell in the 2005 perjury trial, the Tyler newspaper reported. Both read the lines as if they were two actors in a play.

Dowell, a major investigator in the KFC case, testified in 2005 that former Kilgore Police Capt. Marvin Avance gave him a white box that came from the KFC to take to the DPS lab in Tyler. Dowell said that Avance was the custodian of evidence at the time.

The box's chain of custody has long been debated because an evidence log at the Kilgore Police Department came up missing several years ago.